Saturday, April 5, 2008

by Ari

I've been anticipating Wong Kar Wai's My Blueberry Nights for a while now. How can anyone watch Chungking Express, Happy Together, In the Mood For Love or any of his previous films and not love the slick, romantic style and extraordinary visual sensibilities? There's no question Kar Wai is one of the best filmmakers we have right now, and his consistency has been pretty spectacular for the last 18 years or so. My Blueberry Nights premiered at Cannes last year to mostly negative reviews, but I didn't really let it bother me too much. Unfortunately, they were right.

This is simply a misstep for the great director, a visually stylish but poorly written romantic drama about starting over, self-discovery and the strange, unexpected bonds people can make at the most important and desperate moments. The story follow Elizabeth (Norah Jones) on a road trip after her boyfriend breaks her heart by leaving her for another woman. Before Elizabeth ventures off through the heart of America, she spends her nights at a cafe in New York owned by Jeremy (Jude Law), a charming guy who offers a shoulder to lean on and eventually falls for her. Then she leaves and the movie falls apart.

None of the dialogue is very good in My Blueberry Nights, but Law makes his material work. Once we travel across the country with Elizabeth, the film becomes one bad sequence after another, with some of the worst characters I've seen in a Kar Wai movie. None of the actors are believable except for Law, but the section with David Strathairn and Rachel Weisz is particularly awful. He's a cop who drinks too much and she's the wife who doesn't love him anymore. What happens in this portion of the film is the most tedious and dramatically flat filmmaking I've seen from this contemporary master.

Then we get the mostly embarrassing story with Natalie Portman in Nevada. She's a poker player who doesn't trust anyone but needs a friend, and there's a subplot with her father that made the audience laugh at all the wrong moments. None of the characters Elizabeth encounters are interesting. Elizabeth isn't very appealing either. She basically just watches everything around her without any real emotional attachment. I'm not exactly sure what point of her trip changed her, or what she even learned along the way. People are lonely? People need help just like she does? Okay? There's nothing compelling about the relationships we see. The best moments are with Law at his restaurant. There's a sweetness to those sequences that inspire you to actually feel something for the characters you're watching. The rest of the film is just atrocious dialogue and bad acting.